"The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters. It was recorded in the 1960s by the Dixie Cups for Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller's Red Bird Records, but the format we're following here is Sugar Boy's original. Also in the group were Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene 'Bones' Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called 'Jock-A-Mo,' and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jock-A-Mo means 'jester' in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and 'second line' in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That's dead and gone because there's a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps."James "Sugar Boy" Crawford addressed his original in a 2002 interview with OffBeat Magazine:
How did you construct "Jock-A-Mo"?Finally, I realize that The Dixie Cups version of "Iko Iko" doesn't actually have horns, but I couldn't NOT include it. It might be my favorite version, simply because of its simplicity. According to Dixie Cup, Barbara Hawkins, "We were just clowning around with it during a session using drumsticks on ashtrays. We didn't realize that Jerry (Lieber) and Mike (Stoller) had the tapes running." Leiber and Stoller, producers of their version of "Iko Iko," later overdubbed a bass and drums and released it.
It came from two Indian chants that I put music to. "Iko Iko" was like a victory chant that the Indians would shout. "Jock-A-Mo" was a chant that was called when the Indians went into battle. I just put them together and made a song out of them. Really it was just like "Lawdy Miss Clawdy." That was a phrase everybody in New Orleans used. Lloyd Price just added music to it and it became a hit. I was just trying to write a catchy song. Leonard Chess (president of Chess & Checker Records, then Sugar Boy's label) contacted me and arranged for me to go to Cosimo's (J & M Studio) and record it. That was in (November) 1953.
Listeners wonder what "Jock-A-Mo" means. Some music scholars say it translates in Mardi Gras Indian lingo as "Kiss my ass," and I've read where some think Jock-A-Mo was a court jester. What does it mean?
I really don't know (laughs). It wasn't my idea to call the song "Jock-A-Mo," Leonard Chess did that. If you listen to the song, I'm singing C-H-O-C-K, as in Chockamo. Not J-O-C-K, as in Jock-A-Mo. When Leonard listened to the session in Chicago, he thought I said, "Jock-A-Mo." When I saw the record for the first time I said, "That's not the title. It's 'Chock-A-Mo'."
Dirty Dozen Brass Band: It's All Over Now
[purchase]
Though the brass band sound of the second line originated in the funeral traditions of New Orleans -- the term refers to the line of musicians who followed the "first line" of mourners in traditional procession -- its association with New Orleans culture has long brought the syncopated beat and marching brass band sound to a vast array of cultural events which profess to celebrate the great city. In turn, as the musical form has found its way from the funeral to the stages and parades, and as generations of musicians have grown up absorbing its distinctive patterns as one of many influences, it has intermingled with other sounds, becoming a rich part of the tapestry of popular music.
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which fuses traditional second line cadences and instrumentation with the loose energy and tempo of funk, was one of the first and longest running groups to use this second line style as a platform for greatness beyond the confines of Louisiana, and thus is one of the best known; their sound was forged in the late seventies and early eighties, when an ebb in popularity for brass bands in general left them free to experiment with the form. It's All Over Now is from their Columbia Records debut, the hugely popular Voodoo, which featured horn players Dizzy Gillespie and Branford Marsalis, among others; I heard them perform this song at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival a few years later, with Dr. John sitting in as special guest, just like in the original version, and it was an incredible party.
For no apparent reason, the year 1998 seemed to see the sudden emergence of a number of bands playing what the music press would label swing revival music, or Retro-swing. In fact, these bands had toiled in obscurity for most of the 1990s, but why they all captured the popular imagination in 1998 in particular is a mystery. Soon enough, obscurity would welcome them back. Within a year or two, the style, and the bands that played it, had largely disappeared from view. But for that year or two, the music they made was great.
Brian Setzer Orchestra: You‘re The Boss
[purchase]
Brian Setzer was somewhat of a pioneer of this sound. Going solo in the early 1990s, after the breakup of the Stray Cats, he began experimenting with adding horns to his music almost immediately. By 1998, he had arrived at a hybrid of rockabilly and big band music. Here he slows it down,(and incidentally gives us what I believe is the first muted trumpet we’ve heard this week.)
Squirrel Nut Zippers: Suits Are Picking Up The Bill
[purchase]
Squirrel Nut Zippers are the only other band I’m featuring who had much impact with more than one album. This track comes from their album, Perennial Favorites. The follow-up, Hot, received play on MTV, and gave Hell week its title track.
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy: Minnie The Moocher
[purchase]
To my ear, the horn charts used by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy make their music the closest to the big band sound of any of the bands I’m featuring here. “Minnie the Moocher” is a classic tune from the big band era.
Cherry Poppin‘ Daddies: Zoot Suit Riot
[purchase]
Finally, I couldn’t leave this topic without posting “Zoot Suit Riot” by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. This song knocked me out when I first heard it, and it still does. I don’t have much else to say about it. Just listen.
The Mavericks: Dance The Night Away
[purchase]
Floridian alt-country band The Mavericks rose quickly in the nineties, recording six albums, charting 14 singles, and winning several Country Music Awards and a Grammy. Their reign, however, was surprisingly short-lived: though founding singer-songwriter Raul Malo's solo output remains heavily blogged and in-demand, much of the end-run output from the Mavericks was weak; they broke up in 2003 after their last two albums failed to chart in the US.
The Mavericks are well known to me as a cover blogger; in fact, the success and failure of their many cover songs provides a fairly clear exploration of their rise and fall. Their early take on Hank Williams classic Hey Good Looking, on sophomore outing From Hell To Paradise, helped sustain the buzz from their first, self-titled album, bringing their early work to light. Later that decade, their cowboy-paced big band cover of Blue Moon, which appeared on the Apollo 13 soundtrack, was a relatively successful single in North America.
The Cat Stevens cover on their 1999 greatest hits compilation would eventually chart at #42, but the writing was on the wall. Their cover of Hot Burrito #1 was a decent if unexceptional addition to Gram Parsons tribute Return of the Grievous Angel, but didn't stand out as anything special. And soon would come sappy, too-jazzy covers of CCR classic Down on the Corner from the King of the Hill TV show, and a seriously disappointing big-band version of Elvis standard Are You Lonesome Tonight, which appeared on the soundtrack to Babe: Pig in the City, as harbingers of the end. Meanwhile, Raul Malo's decent cover of Springsteen's Downbound Train, on 2000 tribute Badlands, anticipated both the band's dissolution, and Malo's successful solo career.
Happily, their 1998 original single Dance the Night Away remains a stellar stand-out, cheerful and bright-sounding, reminiscent of their early work fusing southern swing, swamp rock, country, rockabilly, and big band arrangements, easily worth placement on the always-excellent Oxford American Southern Sampler series from that year. Malo's work as frontman always reminds me of Roy Orbison in his later, high-country rock days, which isn't a bad thing at all. Thanks to JerseyCynic for reminding me that I had this truly majestic dance number on tap for this week's theme. Meanwhile, here's one for die-hard Elvis fans only:
The Mavericks: Are You Lonesome Tonight
[purchase the Babe soundtrack!]
In the 1930s, at the height of the big band era, there were (especially black) bands that featured blues singers. This meeting of blues and swing was called “rhythm and blues”, and billboard’s first R&B charts were for this music. Later this style became known as “jump blues”.
During and after World War II, two things happened that changed the sound of the blues: one, there was a mass migration of workers to the industrialized northern states, which resulted in acoustic blues players from the south plugging in and creating electric blues; and two, wartime shortages made it prohibitively expensive for large swing bands to tour, and the bands responded by shrinking. Over time, the electric blues and jump blues styles collided, and there began to be bands with drums, electric bass, maybe piano, electric guitar, and two or three horns. At this point you get what we think of today as R&B, and along the way you also get some great blues.
Wynonie Harris: Bloodshot Eyes
[purchase]
Wynonie Harris began his career as one of those big band singers, but found his greatest success after the war as a jump blues singer. “Bloodshot Eyes” was not one of his biggest hits, but it has endured. The song has been covered by everyone from Asleep at the Wheel to Pat Benetar.
Willie Mabon: Seventh Son
[purchase]
Willie Mabon migrated from Memphis to Chicago during the war. There he met Willie Dixon, who wrote “Seventh Son” for him. This is a boasting song, which is thematically related to the better known “Hochie Coochie Man.”
Roomful Of Blues: Walkin' Slow Behind You
[purchase]
Roomful of Blues are a band that sought to bring back the jump blues style long before the recent wave of neo-swing bands. (I don’t mean to knock the neo-swing bands. Look for a post on these bands from me later.) Roomful of Blues did their best work with their original lineup, including guitarist Duke Robilard; his solo work is also well worth seeking out.
B B King: Caldonia
[purchase]
Finally, no presentation of horns in blues would be complete without B B King. “Caldonia” is a classic jump blues tune that many people had recorded before, but B B King changed the balance of horns and guitar, and defined the sound of horns in blues for those who have come after him.
David Wilcox: Chet Baker's Swan Song
[purchase]
Sheryl Crown: We Do What We Can
[purchase]
Two smooth, moody bittersweet ballads of talent lost to the ages -- one nominally folk, the other pop -- which adopt jazz trope and trumpet as a mechanism for paying tribute to beloved jazz trumpet players.
David Wilcox' first person paean to Chet Baker, who struggled with drug addiction for much of his career, paints him as helpless and desperate; the sweet jazzfolk approach effectively evokes both Chet's typically sultry sound and the languid, surface-smooth heroin dreams which many believe prompted him to end his life by leaping off the balcony of a Amsterdam hotel room.
Meanwhile, popster Sheryl Crow dwells in the memory of her father as a frustrated jazzman and lawyer; the faint, high trumpet notes which underscore the arrangement are a subtle wail of lost promise, but the way they waft through the song like the tendrils of memory is perfect for the neo-noir subject treatment.
Interestingly, in addition to similarities of trumpet, trumpeter, tone and tempo, both of these songs are their respective albums' penultimate track; in each case, they are followed by a simple, equally slow song of hope and faith. Coincidence?
Blood, Sweat & Tears: Spinning Wheel
[purchase]
Yet another Grammy-winning Jazz-influenced hybrid from NYC, this time from a band which fused pop, rock, blues and jazz instrumentation and style to form Jazz-Rock (which Wikipedia redirects as a synonym for Jazz Fusion, though I would argue that Jazz-Rock is much more pop- and blues oriented).
I have fond memories of discovering this 1969 sophomore self-titled release just to the left of the folk in my father's record collection one evening in the mid eighties, and subsequently staying up all night spinning and flipping it again and again, straining to catch every flourish and nuance, marveling at the interplay of ragged bluesrock vocals and tight horn arrangements. The album fully deserved its 1970 Grammy for Record of the Year, and the song easily merits its own Grammy for best instrumental arrangement accompanying a vocalist; though in a post-Chicago world it can be too-easily lumped together with the cheese, newcomers willing to listen deeply will find the sound as fresh and authentic as it once was, I think.
The horns here would become so much a part of the song that it would seem impossible to cover it without including them; though Vegas legend Jack Jones heads for a fusion lounge singer sound, and Shirley Bassey funks the place up with bass and blueswail, note how in each cover, the horns embed themselves in the arrangement just about where they were for the original.
Jack Jones: Spinning Wheel [purchase]
Shirley Bassey: Spinning Wheel [purchase]
Digable Planets: Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)
[purchase]
Matt broke the Hip Hop barrier before I could get to this track, and it's hard to top any song that includes both Michael Franti and William S. Burroughs, so I'll keep it short: though this first single from NYC Jazz / Hip Hop fusion trio Digable Planets uses horns only for a particular post-verse emphasis on the short titular chorus, without 'em, this would be a b-side on an album which, itself, marked the height of popularity for both this unusual hybrid form and the artists that created it. Instead, the blare of the horns frames the sparse, broken beat and otherwise-silence which accompanies the dreamy, thoughtful, intelligent lyrics, making a smooth, catchy post-street neo-Beatnik jazzpoetry which not only won a Grammy in 1993 for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, but lingered in this adolescent's turntable for months.
Sadly, however, it's not hard to see why Digable Planets' second album was a flop: the rest of Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) pretty much sounds just like this track, so who needed more than one album of it? As a novelty, it is powerful and refreshing, well worth having; in the long run, diversification probably would have made a difference. Today, though all involved have under-the-radar solo careers, notably, it is turntablist, soundman, producer and remixer King Britt, nee Silkworm, who often plays with ?uestlove Thompson of The Roots, who is best known, rather than the three vocalists Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug Mecca.
Why is it that we are still talking about Louis Armstrong, almost 100 years after his birth?
Oh, man. I think the true, profoundly intellectual contribution of Louis Armstrong has not been fully understood by the general public. Here's this wonderful, warm, avuncular guy who's known to the people around the world as the guy who sang, "Hello, Dolly," smiling and laughing. But it reminds of a story of a, Freeman Dyson said about the physicist Richard Fineman. He said when he first met him he thought he was half genius and half buffoon. But after knowing him for a long time he realized he was all genius and all buffoon. And people, people expect art to be serious and, and dry and something, whereas Louis' art is as deep and as profound as any art that's ever been on Earth. And yet it's, it's an art of joy and, human experience embodied. So, and yet I think at the same time Louis was just part of the intellectual trend that was going on in other, in the arts and in the sciences. He was the first person to embody abstraction musically. Other people used abstraction in music, but over time. Composers would sit down and take an idea and toy with it over time, but Louis could spontaneously take a melody and abstract it, that is remove all the unessentials from this melody and be left with just this pure vision of what the melody could be. And this is of course an idea that has been the grist for Jazz musicians since that, since that time. And it can all be traced back to Louis, this idea of abstracting a melody.
You had a quote about they say that all philosophy...
Oh, yeah. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher, said that all of Western philosophy can be reduced to commentary on Plato. You can say that all of western philosophy is merely commentary on Plato. Well it's absolutely true that all of Jazz is commentary on Louie Armstrong. And you can show specific examples of this when you listen to the Miles Davis of the "Kind of Blue" album, the way he plays on "So What." Ba, ba, boo, boom, boo, boo, bee, bum, bee, bum, bum. Boo, boo... a simple melody that a, an initial motif is developed over time. That idea comes from Louis, and Miles himself said, "You cannot play anything on a trumpet that Louie Armstrong, Louie Armstrong did not play already." If you listen to his, the, the most profound advances that Louie Armstrong made were in the area of rhythm. Jazz is the ultimate temporal artform. Music is a temporal artform, but Jazz is ultimately the temporal artform. And it's about the human experience of time. How is time embodied? So you listen to Louis playing a quarter note, and suddenly your whole experience of that day has changed. You hear him playing this one quarter note, and time is not moving along in the way that it normally moves along. And if you listen to modern Jazz, it's taken sixty years for Louis' idea of sophisticated polyrhythm to meld down into the Jazz rhythm section, that is into the drums and the bass. When Louis was playing, he sounded like he came from Mars. He's playing the most sophisticated things imaginable and the other guys are playing very, what sounds now very dated. Louis' music never sounds dated, but the bands that he played with often did. But now sixty years later you have bands that are finally absorbed his messages, his ideas rhythmically. And that's still, this is still what Jazz musicians are working on, sixty years after his main recordings.
That's terrific. Can you imagine a moment in Denmark — what's this story?
Well, all of us have had these epochal moments where you, you see your, you see something or you hear some music and your life is changed forever. For me, it was seeing a film on television of Louie Armstrong playing in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1933, playing the tune "Dinah." He is absolutely on fire, unbelievable. And, and his solo on "Dinah" is a, is a perfect example of this abstraction. And it occurred to me that it was possible and no one will tell me otherwise, it's a fantasy that I treasure, that Werner Hizenberg could have been in the audience in Copenhagen in 1933. He lived in Copenhagen at that time, and in 1933 he won the Nobel prize for his work on quantum mechanics. And I've always had this fantasy that he and a couple of other scientists after a hard day of work on quantum mechanics went out that night, heard Louie Armstrong, and were completely blown away, and realized that in a completely different idiom, he embodied everything that they were working on. Profound new ideas about time, space and human, the human place in the cosmos. And they saw Louis playing and they thought, "Wow, that's it." In a language utterly different than their scientific language. And yet it's the same... a modern response, this is the story of modernism.
If you look at these paintings by Mondrian, when he started out painting a bridge when he was a young man, it looked like a bridge. You see it, it's a bridge. Then gradually over time, he would remove elements from that picture of the bridge, remove more elements, boil these elements down until,until there was just a gesture of a bridge, until the 1930's you would just see two lines in space. And, and Louis I'm sure was not thinking, "Oh, my God, I've got to do something just like Mondrian on the trumpet." But innately he was. Somehow these ideas were in the cosmos, and I personally would rather hear Louie communicate these ideas than anybody else, either Hizenberg or Mondrian or anybody. Because for him, these ideas are embodied, experienced and can be communicated in an embodied and experiential kind of way.
I wanna just talk a little bit about Einstein, because I really think the greatest parallel between Armstrong is with Louis, is, is with Albert Einstein. First of all, there are these obvious parallels that both of them were founders of new ways of looking at the world. Louis Armstrong founded Jazz phrasing, a new way of experiencing time. And, and Albert Einstein founded the theory of relativity. They were thought of by the general public in similar kinds of ways. They were avuncular, warm people who were known all over the world. I mean, Albert Einstein was known by everyone, even people who had no idea of what his theories were about. And they generally liked him, they liked his vibe. He was a warm, kind of strange-looking kind of guy who smiled alot. Louis Armstrong was known all over the world by people who had no real interest in Jazz, as this incredibly warm communicator of joy, even if they didn't know exactly why he should be so famous. So on, on that obvious level there's some relationship to them. But it occurred to me that there are a number of components that people commonly understand to be part of the theory of relativity. And one of those is that as you move closer to the speed of light, time slows down. So it occurred to me once while listening to a Louie Armstrong solo that he embodied this aspect of, of the theory of relativity. The faster the music would go, the more Louie sounded utterly at ease and utter, utterly relaxed. And you can actually do an experiment, what Einstein called "gedanken experiments," thought experiments. If you imagine all of the music removed except Louie's playing. And when you're left with just Louie's playing, what you have is freedom and eternity and rest. It's a paradox of music that music is both about being and becoming and music is the ultimate art of change and becoming. And yet at the same time, Louis' playing embodied being, just eternity, there is no time. And, and the faster the music went, the more Louis sounded relaxed.
He had slowed down time...
He had slowed, I think so. I really think so.
Somehow in his gut he was able to make time stop. And I think that's true for all great musicians, but no one more so than Louis Armstrong. That the faster the music went, the more it sounded like he was utterly at peace and utterly at ease. It's an extraordinary thing, really extraordinary.
Do you feel there's a connection between Einstein and Armstrong?
I've always felt that there's this connection between Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And there's a connection between them on a variety of levels. They both initiated radical changes in human thought in their particular fields. Armstrong in music and Einstein in physics. Also paradoxically enough, they both, although they started these revolutionary schools, they both were kind of left behind by the, by their progeny. That is, Einstein never really got on board with quantum mechanics. He would say to Nils Bohr, "I refuse to believe that God plays dice with the universe." And Nils Bohr would say, "Stop telling God what to do." And Louis Armstrong, who really gave birth to Bebop, essentially in his solo on "Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas," he plays da, da, doop, da, doop, da, dap, do, dat, salt peanuts, which became the theme of Dizzy Gillespie. But he never really dug Bebop, and the Beboppers never realized their incredible debt to Armstrong.
Was there another scientific thing you wanted to throw out?
Yeah, I read a book by James Gliche called Chaos, which is about complexity theory and the Mandlebrat set. And it proves that in a finite space you can have infinite detail. And when I was listening to Louis play, I thought, "This is it. One note of Louis Armstrong is a finite amount of time." It takes place in three seconds, but there's an infinite amount of detail in that one note, it's complexity embodied.
I think we needed Louis Armstrong to get through this century. Do we need him?
I, you know, I'm just very happy to be on Earth when there is Louis Armstrong. People try to imagine what it was like to be on Earth before Mozart. Mozart's music is so important to us. Try to imagine what it was like to be on Earth before Louis Armstrong. It has meant so much to so many people, his music. It is, he makes people happy. I can't imagine a higher calling in life than that, I can't imagine a higher calling than making people feel joy.
Talking Heads: Mr. Jones
[purchase]
Naked was to be the last Talking Heads album. The other members of the band had come to feel that David Byrne had taken over, leaving no room for their input. As great as Naked is, comparing its sound to Byrne's solo work immediately after the breakup of the band shows that they were right.
But what a way to go out! The album included the hit Nothing But Flowers, as well as Mr. Jones. Here Byrne uses Latin-style horns to kick this song into overdrive. For his solo album Rei Momo, Byrne would assemble a crack band of Latin musicians to continue exploring this sound.
Submitted by Darius
The Beatles: Got To Get You Into My Life
[purchase]
Earth Wind & Fire: Got To Get You Into My Life
[purchase]
Bloggers don't usually bother prattling on about The Beatles; there seems to be an unspoken assumption in modern culture that the larger-than-life phenomenon of the Beatles as icons somehow contains their history, making any discourse moot. And it is true, I suppose, that the Beatles' use of horns is so culturally recognizable, it's practically memetic; I'm sure I'm not the only one who grew up believing that the French stole the first few bars of All You Need Is Love for their national anthem.
But before the brassband sound of 1967's Sgt. Pepper and its horn-carrying cover, or the faux-military capriciousness of the psychedelic, love-happy 1969 Yellow Submarine, came the sunshiny britpop of 1966 masterpiece Revolver, and it is here, in the underrated Got To Get You Into My Life, we find Beatles' first use of horns -- in truth, a better harbinger of the anthemic, almost carnivalesque sound of Sgt. Pepper than the animated nonsense of a brightly lit underwater world which would follow, though GTGYIML didn't chart until 1976, a full decade after its original release, when it was re-cast as a single with Helter Skelter on the B-side.
The song takes on a darker foreshadowing, too, revealing the kernels of later, deeper Beatles songs, if you accept the underground explanation, later confirmed in Paul's 1998 bio, that he wrote this one about his desire to smoke marijuana, rather than about, say, a girl.
Meanwhile, where the original song's use of brass provides a blare of orchestral sound right from the starting block, thus framing the Beatles' paean to reefer with a swinging pace, Earth Wind & Fire adopt a totally different approach for their take on the song for 1977 movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here, the electric fuzz of funk takes the intro, while the horn section takes a more Disco-era turn as a form of rhythmic flair more typically found in elevators than anywhere else these days. Take the two versions together, and despite the fact that they ultimately achieved their fame within a year from each other, you've got practically a textbook study in contrast between two musical genres, and their respective use of brass.
